How Am I Supposed To Act?
Improv theatre is acting without preparation and without a net; given a situation, improv challenges you to participate in a new reality on the spot. As such, it’s a powerful means of learning, and exploring, stimulating creativity, engaging in rapid decision-making, and building empathy-all skills that come into play in agile development projects. In this session, we’ll scratch the surface of improvisational theatre through a series of simple exercises and games. Session attendees are strongly encouraged to participate or simply to observe as their comfort level permits
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“Act” is a word with a number of meanings and associations. There’s the sense of performing a task (“let’s act on that now”); of presenting a show (“I acted in a local theatre group); of putting on a facade (“he’s trying to be brave, but it’s just an act”); of a role in an organization (“she’s acting CEO”); of behaving appropriately (“just act naturally”) or inappropriately (“she’s acting up”). Acting gives us a chance to see things from another perspective, to put on a new identity, and to take it off at will, and to explore relationships and motivations of other people—and ourselves.
Improv theatre is acting without preparation, without a script, and without a net; given a situation or an idea, improv challenges you and your colleagues to create, develop, and participate in a new reality on the spot. As such, it’s a powerful means of learning, exploring, stimulating creativity, engaging in rapid decision-making, and building empathy—all skills that come into play in agile development projects.
In this session, we’ll scratch the surface of improvisational theatre through a series of simple exercises and games. We’ll try to establish safety, such that people need not feel awkward or silly—unless it’s part of the act. Session attendees are strongly encouraged to participate or simply to observe as their comfort level permits. Be prepared to drop your usual pretenses, to put some new ones on, and to have a few belly laughs along the way.
The first 20 minutes or so will include an introduction to the concepts of improvisational theatre (that’s the way we spell it here), how it evolved, why it evolved, and so forth. The remainder of the first half of the session will be a set of basic improv activities, starting with warmup and communication exercises, and moving on to more complex games and scenarios in the second half. We’ll be able to accommodate something on the order of 20 people who want to participate directly (up to 30 if I can recruit a partner that I have in mind, but he’s not registered on the site yet).
I’ve given a session like this one at the AYE Conference in 2006, where it was warmly received by those who attended—it was a good mix of development consultants, some developers, some project management people, if I remember correctly.
Games could include switching of games and roles; simulations of team dynamics; customer vs. programmer conflict; placating vs. blaming vs. super-reasonableness vs. loving vs. hating vs. acting irrelevantly; Bring Me A Rock (but with justification for the request); telephone games; people with secret agendas; games in which plans are made with insufficient information, where variation takes the plot away from the plan, etc., etc.
One more thing, if it matters: I can’t be present the first day of the conference.
New: Adam White has agreed to join me as co-presenter. Adam is a small-a agile tester, and has been studying improv for the last couple of years.